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Shifting Constellations / 163which both the nucleus and the circulating orbits are dismantled and reconƒgured,forming shifting constellations which are unfamiliar. In this, Neeladopted the attitude of the bohemian Villagers, whose “experimental” attitudestoward the family were charted by Caroline Ware. In 1935, 86 percentbelieved women should have independent interests, 76 percent believed thatit was not wrong for unmarried couples to live together, 70 percent believedthat husbands should share in household tasks, and 65 percent believed thatmarried women should be self-supporting. 3These attitudes were hardly re„ected in popular culture. From the turn ofthe century, when the Kodak camera was invented, photographs of familymembers gathered for ritual occasions, such as religious holidays or weddings,provided assurance that the family was a cohesive unit. Similarly, in Americanillustration, works such as Norman Rockwell’s bountiful Thanksgiving table inFreedom from Want (1943) became as emblematic of patriotism as the „ag. 4Neel’s family album contains no family ritual and little evidence of who is relatedto whom. Her relations are not necessarily next of kin, but nephews, stepsons,or people whom she includes by “elective afƒnity.” Her portrait gallerythus blurs the distinction between relationships and blood relatives.Neel’s critique of the construct of the American family reads from the pointof view of a woman who dared to „out its norms and who suffered the consequences.Like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot before her, she examines thewoman’s realm, but unlike her nineteenth-century upper-class predecessors,she will ƒnd in that shared space of interpersonal relationships discord and isolationas well as intimacy and privacy.In the private wing of the portrait gallery, the family is portrayed as a sitepermeated by social and political pressures. The meaning of each portrait residesin its juxtaposition with associated portraits: one must be interpreted as it“relates” to another. In 1965, for instance, Neel painted three works that referredmetaphorically to the Vietnam War. The most monumental of the threedepicts her son Hartley at the end of an emotionally stressful ƒrst semester atTufts Medical School (Hartley, 1965, ƒg. 158). Posed with his hands on top ofhis head like a captured prisoner of war, his elbows forming visual road signspointing in opposite directions, Hartley registers his dilemma over what coursehis life should take. Representing the moral quandary of so many Americanmen of his generation, Hartley was “in a trap,” as Neel put it. Drafted Negro(ƒg. 159), in turn, shows a dejected young man whose number has come up;he is of the wrong race and class to be eligible for deferment from service inVietnam. Finally, when placed with the two portraits, the Soutine-like Thanksgiving(1965, ƒg. 160) can be interpreted as Neel’s comment on the escalatingslaughter of the war and the wrenching internal con„ict into which it thrustour citizenry: the capon is a „ayed corpse and the contiguous dishrag its dis-